SALINAS, Calif. – Concentric Power plans to hire 25 more people as demand grows for one of its latest products, a software platform that lets companies optimize their energy usage from various sources.

“We’re intelligently looking at – in real time – what’s going on with wind and solar and customer load and all these things, and then the pieces that we can control, like the engines and the batteries, we intelligently dispatch, or turn on and off, those resources,” said CEO Brian Curtis. “You have all these dynamic things that have a life of their own, and we’re able to be in touch with those in real time with our software and then sort of optimize everything based on technical requirements but also economic signals and spot market pricing for power and fuel pricing and all that kind of stuff.

“It’s kind of blowing up into this bigger thing than we realized we were onto, and it’s being driven a lot by customer demand and what they’re asking us to do for them, so that’s pretty exciting,” Curtis said June 27 at the Forbes AgTech Summit, where the company was exhibiting in the Innovation Showcase.

The platform also uses artificial intelligence, learning patterns so it can apply them later on.

Ultimately, it is all designed to save companies money while reducing their emissions. There is another benefit as well – one particularly significant in heavily regulated California.

“Energy independence is a harder-to-quantify but equally important thing,” Curtis said.

Concentric has much of its business in the state, but Canada and Mexico are also on the table. Regions in the U.S. that the company finds promising include the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast.

“The pain that we’re solving for is high energy cost and maybe utilities that are not necessarily providing the services that customers want,” Curtis said.

Given its success in California, the company expects to deliver good results elsewhere also.